2009

My work has evolved into a hybrid-practice combining painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and digital imaging into larger installations, with particular and unique reference to color and light and to physical space. I am interested in traversing the boundaries of three specific content areas.
Transparent-Mystery: Transforming unlikely, everyday materials into art with limited alteration so as to remain recognizable as they inexplicably begin to appear mysterious and opaque.
Fragment-Whole: Making distinguishable and separate parts into a single work of art, which then becomes a single unit or component of a larger installation whole.
Time-Continuum: Making simultaneous historic and contemporary references; Altering older work and combining it with new; And, as in a recent solo in New York, visually and conceptually linking that current exhibition with one from my past, then linking my exhibition with those of the gallery that came immediately before and after mine.

New to my recent work is a return to the painterly gesture describing an illusionistic image on canvas. These new paintings however are meant to be quotations of familiar images, in this case, Japanese motifs and decoration.* The motif-paintings are treated simply as another recognizable everyday object or material that I combine with others to make art. They are inserted and arranged as one component of many, inside what I call a cluster. I see each cluster as an individual and complete work of art that relates to other clusters nearby, and so on, until the entire single installation is achieved. The intention is to equalize the value of the familiar Japanese image with the common, everyday objects used. These cluster-pieces, or pods of visual narrative that radiate out to other pod-narratives, can be seen to mirror our hyper-linked, web-based information age, with no start or finish, no linear historic narrative.

For at least a decade, my manipulations of commonplace packaging materials and various kinds of ephemera have made multiple iconographic references, from the modernist grid to computer circuitry, from the Italian Baroque to Japanese art and Anime. When my early drawing/collages, using paper labels and stickers, began to impersonate the look and geometry of computer circuit boards (2000-1), I was inspired to enlist real computer circuitry to ‘re-draw’ the label designs as digital files in graphics software. The result closed the circle: Paper labels mimicking circuitry that in turn mimics paper labels. I want to have it both ways: exploit the glamour and scope of technology while retaining the political agency of art made with my hands out of mundane materials.

*The Japanese influence is a result of a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant where I spent the summer of 2008 as a Visiting Artist at Kyoto University of Art & Design. It is Part 2 of a long-term project entitled, “Ephemera & Culture: Italy, Turkey, and Japan—a Trilogy,” three bodies of artwork initiated in, and made from the ephemera of, three distinct cultures outside the U.S. Part 1, “Italy,” was begun at the American Academy in Rome where I was a Visiting Artist in 2003-4.